Equal Playing Time: Should It Be the Rule, Not the Exception?

The Fifty Percent "Solution"?

One year, when my sons were playing travel
soccer, they had a coach who I will calll Nick. The season consisted of eight games, one
every Saturday afternoon. The policy of the Massachusetts Youth Soccer
Association was for every child to play a minimum of fifty percent of
each game.

Seems fair enough, right?
Think again. The way it worked on Nick's team was for six of the
players (one of them his son) to play between seventy-five and one
hundred percent of the game while the remaining twelve boys (including
two of my sons) shared the remaining time. Sure, they all played fifty
percent of each game, but thirty-five minutes, instead of the upwards
of seventy the "favored" played each week.

The Coach’s Favorite

One of the players seemed to
get special consideration. Ricky was a strong, natural athlete: big,
fast and tall. Yet, despite the fact that he had never played travel
soccer, missed all but two of the team's sixteen weekday practices!!
due to other sport team commitments, he never came out of the game!
Ever!

The favoritism that Nick
showed Ricky wasn't lost on the parents, many of who grumbled on the
sidelines about how unfair it was that he was always playing.

Building Resentment

It wasn't lost on the players
either. Most players were essentially sharing a position with another
boy and by the end of the season, each had played the equivalent of
four full games, while the "lucky" six had played almost eight full
games. Yet, each family paid the full price for their sons to be on the
team.

Since it is generally
agreed that the more one plays, the better one tends to get, not only
did playing the less developed players less than the more skilled and
experienced players make it harder for them to catch up to the other
boys, but, worse, it made being on the team less fun and tended to
build resentment among the &quot;have nots&quot; towards the full time players
which was clearly destructive of team chemistry and cohesion.

Playing, Not Winning, Should Come First

Dr. Milton Fujita, a California-based child-adolescent psychiatrist, has seen plenty of
children harmed by participation in sports. "Organizing games for
children is fine as long as it's organized so all the kids who want to
play actually get to play," he says. "When the whole issue of winning
becomes primary, then participation suffers.. Winning is kind of
inherent. You can't really de-emphasize it. But winning at all costs is
something that needs to be looked at very seriously," says Fujita.